SkyOS beta 6762 has been released. "SkyOS Beta 6762 is now available to download directly from the Beta Center. This build features the new Viewer, a huge performance increase, 36 additional API Classes, updated libraries, a new font alpha blending method, 280+ fixed bugs including critical boot bug fixes."

Your post about binary compatibility is senseless. The disregard of it is anything else than "horrible". It doesn't matter. Next, gcc stays binary compatible a long, long, long time. It's only g++ that broke often recently.

I meant GCC in the GNU Compiler Collection sense, not in the C compiler sense. G++ breaks compatibility frequently. Once you get outside of x86, there tend to be a few platforms breaking binary compatibility with every release.

On Windows I want binary compatibility, because I would need it! On a open source operating system it's nothing more than a hindrance to evolution of the software.

I don't care about evolution of software. I want a stable platform to work on. It's not worth breaking things for every minor improvement.

Binary compatibility matters for all users. Source compatibility only matters for developers, who are vastly outnumbered by normal users. And it only matters as much as it does because a Linux system is hundreds of libraries with little to no coordination between the developers.

But now to go one step further: API/ABI compatibility on Windows as the outstanding proprietary platform to compare with, is horrible too -- talking about libraries! Most programs install their own version of the needed libs just exactly for this reason. And the mess goes so far that Windows has extra mechanisms builtin to restore overwritten librarys automatically!

Microsoft very stupidly put little in the way of version control into DLLs. They improved it in later years. The problems you're talking about are incompetent developers. They're not flaws in the system.

This wouldn't happen on a open source system, apart from your "API incompatibility" most programs manage to use the system-wide libs instead of static linkage etc.

You should pay more attention. It's really common for zlib, libpng, libssl, and a few other common libraries to be statically linked. wxWidgets is another common one to be statically linked - largely because they tend to make API changes even in point releases. It's more license issues than anything else that prevents static linking being more common.